The Jailhouse

[thepennyking]

While I was in Mexico recently I noticed the following recent developments:This dusty village is on the edge of ruin. It was once a thriving coffee-growing village, but many farmers have been forced to abandon a livelihood practiced by their families for generations. With the World Summit on Sustainable Development tackling such issues in Johannesburg this week, MSNBC.com looks at a key question: how small farmers, like these in Mexico, can stay on their land and out of the destitute shanty towns of Mexico City and other urban areas of the developing world.


In recent years, coffee has made fortunes for corporations around the globe, but the profits haven't trickled down to farmers. In fact, the traditional farmers of El Paraiso -- and their brethren in places like Kenya, Indonesia, Brazil and Zambia - are being driven out of business by low prices and corporate farms that produce ever higher crop yields.






• The facts on one of the world's great commoditites, imagine the price of coffee collapsing to a penny a pound?



From a business standpoint, this may seem natural: Companies that market the world's coffee are not charities. Like every industry, they buy their raw materials as cheaply as possible and mark them up as much as possible, pocketing the difference for their investors.

But in Mexico and other coffee-producing nations, the social and environmental costs of doing business this way have been enormously high. The World Bank estimates that 540,000 Central American laborers have lost their jobs due to the current coffee crisis.

Villages have turned into ghost towns as their inhabitants, no longer able to make ends meet, crowd into the dangerous and ever-expanding shantytowns that ring major cities in the developing world. Mexico City, one of the world's largest urban sprawls with 21 million inhabitants, is filled with such refugees.

Large, corporate farms do increase productivity and yield. But they also consume good land at an alarming rate. In Brazil, huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest are burned illegally to make room for these farms. In Mexico, illegal timber harvesting has led to flooding and erosion that also destroys prospects for agriculture.

Increasingly, grass-roots organizations and some governments are asking: Is there a future for small-scale farmers in places like Mexico? And, if not, what will the millions of peasants do for a living when their farms are bankrupt?

What if 21 million Mexicans fled Mexico and came to America to scarf up pennies so they could cash them in for a dollar each? Do you know what its like to have swarms of Mexicans with their hands out surrounding your car?